Our Military, Ourselves

What does the military mean for the America of 2018? What should it mean?

In the face of competition between candidates for political endorsements by military leaders in the 2016 presidential election and the appointment of several active-duty and retired generals to high-level positions in the Trump administration, the issue of the proper role of military officers vis-à-vis politics and political leaders has become more urgent, even if it hasn’t (yet) reached a crisis point.

Seventeen years into a war that’s been shouldered by a tiny fraction of the population and achieved ambiguous results, we, as a society, are increasingly confronted by a complex, shifting relationship between the military and the society it serves. Earlier this month, at New America’s annual Future of War Conference, several key figures in the realm of civil-military relations—Kori Schake, Eliot Cohen, Matt Cavanaugh, and Janine Davidson—addressed this very tension. While the entire panel is worth watching, of particular relevance to the current moment is a point made by Schake, the deputy director-general of the International Institute for Strategic Studies: that “the solution to almost every problem in civil-military relations is treating our military like what they are, which is us.”

Put another way, if the American public’s relationship with the military ought to resemble a reflection, Americans, in the aggregate, seem to be stepping away from the mirror. We therefore ought to investigate how to restore clarity to this image.

The Current State of Civil-Military Relations

One key takeaway from the panel—entitled “Does the Pentagon Have Too Much Power?”—was that the military is the only public institution that continues to have high levels of respect. Gallup polling shows that, while institutions such as Congress and the media are frequently viewed with low levels of confidence, confidence in the military has grown at a fairly consistent rate since the poll began in 1975.

However, this high regard exists in a public that’s less connected to, interested in, and knowledgeable about the military. While widespread public support for the military isn’t intrinsically a bad thing, context matters. As Cohen, the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, explained, over the past five decades, the combination of a shift to an all-volunteer military force and a national desire to become a global superpower has led the U.S. military to inhabit a world apart from the rest of the public.

That “world apart” is both physical and cultural. A Pew study showed that, while a large majority of people over 50 years old have immediate family members who served in the military, that’s true for only around one-third of people age 18-29. As Cohen noted, this increasing disconnect is in part due to the economically efficient but culturally isolating decision by the military to consolidate service members onto mega-bases and “double down on places like Texas A&M, which can generate oodles and oodles of perfectly qualified officers. But, it means that you’re making sure that there’s a whole generation of college graduates that don’t really know anybody who’s in military service.”

In consequence, noted Davidson, the president of the Metropolitan State University of Denver, America has seen the ballooning of a shallow, ritualized respect—a “thank you for your service culture… that’s almost a fetish at this point”—that stems largely from a public that has “checked out” of giving much deep thought to the military and its members.

The Political Implications of This Divide

To borrow from the author and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Phil Klay, this instinctual, “gooey, substance-free” approval is symptomatic of a distracted nation that’s been taught to view the military as the solution to public problems. This leads to an adjacent theme the panel touched on: Not only is the public increasingly willing to give members of the military leeway in tackling politics—increasingly, it wants them to be political.

This desire to give members of the military—whether active-duty or retired—a larger political role is, in many ways, a logical extension of the token regard shown to the military. As Rosa Brooks, an ASU Future of War senior fellow at New America and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, has explained before, we’ve learned to insert the military into emerging policy problems that we consider worth solving—from malaria to terrorism to cybersecurity. “The military’s position,” Schake explained, “is that ‘we’re just trying to give what the country needs from us.’ That’s endearing.” So, given the formula policy problem + military = working solution, it makes sense that the public now sees political problems as missions suited for members of the military.

But making subjective what’s supposed to be objective has severe implications for the country’s long-term health—including making Americans feel unrepresented by the military. To bring this point into focus, Schake spoke to how people’s perceptions of the military are like those we increasingly have of the Supreme Court: “I like it when they agree with the policies I support, and then I have doubts about these guys when they don’t support my policies.” Moreover, even if partisanship comes from individual members of the military, the public often uses officers as proxies for the military more broadly. And indeed, Schake noted that surveys already indicate a decreasing level of trust in military advice by political elites, precisely because this slow erosion of the non-partisan norm leads the military to be perceived as yet another political actor, not as a provider of impartial advice.

Seeing More of Ourselves in the Military

To improve our self-image as reflected in the military, we can start by emulating the best parts of ourselves. For instance, military service is the “single best-testing trait” for candidates in the 2018 election. Indeed, a survey by a “cross-partisan” veteran’s super PAC found that 29 percent of Democrats and 32 percent of Republicans would cross party lines to vote for a veteran. In these polarized times, that’s a bracing bit of data.

How could retired service members running for office be a good thing, if politicization of the military is one of the problems? It has to do with the reason people are drawn to veterans in the first place: They’re viewed as “mission-oriented coalition-builders who can work across the aisle.” If political support for retired service members is based more on the professional, service-oriented ethos of the military than on adversarial partisan instinct, then perceptions of the military could align with the public interest.

Even so, this is the case only if these service members-turned-candidates actually live up to that standard. Again, the growing distance between the military and society means that the public’s perception of veterans as a last bastion of committed civil servants might not entirely match with reality. Most of the country doesn’t have a connection to members of the military and, therefore, has developed a romanticized notion of military service, as Raphael Cohen, a political scientist at the RAND Corporation, recently put it. Cavanaugh reiterated this point at the conference, saying that “a trusting relationship is give and take, is equivalent at some level. It’s not fawning.”

More broadly, this trusting relationship requires tough love and a recognition that, according to Cavanaugh, “service to something higher than oneself is not special to the military, but… it’s also fair to say that what we do is unique.” As Klay observes, moving things forward will look like average Americans taking part in debates on how, where, and why the military is used and “scorning anyone who tried to tell them they [can’t]. It would look like average Americans rolling their eyes… when our leaders tell us we’re not at war while American troops are risking their lives.”

It will take some time for the public to refocus its image of the military. More than that, it will require some thoughtful examination, scrutiny, and skepticism, as well as a healthy dose of respect—a concern arising from genuine care, not from the pursuit of platitudes. But, in the end, it may well turn out that we like what we see.